RE: [OPE] "Parasitism" Ford versus Soros

The point I was making was that certain capitalists perform a productive role - Henry Ford the first for example, by devising new and more productive methods in industry. His process of producing relative surplus value was historically progressive. Nothing similar could be said of hedge funds.
 
Paul Cockshott
Dept of Computing Science
University of Glasgow
+44 141 330 1629
www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/

________________________________

From: ope-bounces@lists.csuchico.edu on behalf of Gerald Levy
Sent: Sat 1/24/2009 10:26 PM
To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list
Subject: Re: [OPE] "Parasitism"

> The capitalist who actually manages and supervises a production process
> like Steve Jobs
> or Bill Gates till recently, is quite different from the rentier.

Hi Paul C:

Yes, there are different _forms_ of parasitism. Insofar as individual
capitalists are concerned,
there are those who _directly_ live off of the surplus labor performed by
wage-workers and
there are those who _indirectly_ live off of that labor (such as rentiers).
To the extent
that rents are paid by either a segment of the capitalist class or the class
as a whole, then
it represents a deduction from profit and this ultimately has its source in
the extraction of
surplus value by capitalists. As I said before, the prejudice against
rentiers is a prejudice of
capitalists against the landowning class and the 'rentier' section of the
capitalist class.

In solidarity, Jerry

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